This post marks half-way through our Speekee Accelerate review! We have covered 20 weeks of lessons in just over 12 weeks. We’ve kept up with the worksheets easily and although we haven’t always been able to do all of the additional activities that are recommended we have done most of them in small group!
As a Home Educator myself I’ve found that the small group setting we have developed for this review is working really well for us. Our small group entails my daughter Chloe (6), Timothy (7) and Georgina (11) and my other daughter Carmela (4) but she usually only joins in with the games! We meet every fortnight on a Monday morning.
We have noticed that the quality of the content of the programme has remained of a very high standard and the videos are really great! We got BIG laughs from the children when they watched this latest video for weeks 17 & 18 – which despite only being five minutes long is crammed with more than enough material to support the activities!
Week 17 begins with a passport theme that practices questions such as “Where are you from?”, “What’s your name?”, “What have you got?”, “How old are you?”. The worksheet activity for week 17 reinforces the verb Tener (to have) which the children get many chances to conjugate (there is plenty of room to develop this also for more advanced students).
In this unit the children also practice asking, ¿De dónde eres?” and recaps the flags and nationalities learnt in the previous units.
We didn’t get chance to do all of the activities in this unit but the ones we did do the children enjoyed very much, especially the last activity in week 18 where we showed them pictures of famous places in certain countries. We asked them the name of the city and in which country it was. You can use images from the countries in the word- search (week 18, activity 3) which are: Holanda; Estados Unidos; Francia; Suecia; Argentina; Italia; Australia; China, we also added our own Spanish-speaking countries such as Mexico and Spain.
Weeks 19 & 20 look at shopping. The worksheets reinforce the vocabulary learnt throughout this unit, I found the children were more than happy to get on with these on their own with little involvement from me.
A good way to practice shopping in Spanish would be through role play. However we decided to do a shopping scavenger hunt at our local supermarket. We’ll be doing it soon so I’ll post about how it went soon.
One of the activities for this Unit was to make una Tortilla Española (Spanish Omelette). We followed the recipe on the Speekee Blog. As it is in English I read the instructions and ingredients out to Georgina in Spanish, she understood and did a fine job of preparing a yummy tortilla for lunch!
After enjoying our feast we got on with some more Speekee and played charades with food vocabulary that we choose from the worksheets (week 19, activity 4). Each of us wrote two items of food on two separate pieces of paper, we then put them all in a bowl in the middle of the table and took it in turns to take one. The others took it in turn to ask questions, for example ¿es una bebida? ¿es verde?, the person that guessed the food item correctly went next. It was fun and the children enjoyed it very much!
For more information about the Speekee Accelerate Programme or any of the other resources available through Speekee visit their website www.speekee.com.
Click here to read my next post that covers weeks 21 & 22.